Wordpress & SEO Markup

[Nightwing]

Buon Giorno from 6 degrees C wetherby UK

I'm close to commissioning a designer to create a wordpress driven site but I'm anxious around the standard of the markup. Specifically I need pages to have the classic unique title tags, one H1 tag per page and contnet in p tags.
Now I know theres a wordpress plugin claiming to empower the administartor to have control but are there any icebergs ahead I need navigate to ensure my sites meets Google optimization guildlines?

Any advice welcome

[BlueprintMarketing]

You are welcome. I am more than happy to help and I am sure that you are going to absolutely love WordPress. It's a fantastic platform I'm glad I could  be of   help to you sincerely, Thomas

[Nightwing]

Thank you so much for all replies, Ive now commissioned a word press site

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Bruno,

If you do not have a SEO you're working with already. You will have one of the most talented people in the business right here Dan is a fantastic SEO and knows WordPress cold.

His site is powered by WordPress http://www.evolvingseo.com/  it also contains a lot of great blog posts that can help point you in the right direction.

If you're looking for somebody to recommend a developer as well as do the search engine optimization I would say Dan is one of the best people in the world.  He is also an all-around great guy.

If you are in fact looking for somebody to do search on your WordPress site I would say you hit the jackpot if he is available.

Dan,

I don't mean to embarrass you by saying all this. But this is the truth and I would be saying this regardless as amount of knowledge and skill you have in this area remarkable.

All the best my friend,

Thomas

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There Buon Giorno from 15ish F in Massachusetts

Thomas has a lot of good stuff in there - I'll just give a consolidated answer to reiterate.

WordPress will do all of that for you. I assume the designer is going to create a custom theme for you? This means they'll do custom HTML and CSS. First off, make sure to verify they are going to do this all as a child theme. Developers will usually do a child theme off of a standard parent theme like TwentyThirteen etc. A child theme will give you seperation between what the designer codes, and what came in the parent theme. This way you can edit the child theme without breaking the parent theme.

As Thomas said you do have full control of all of your code. But how the designer builds it will affect things. There's one of two things you can do here;

1. ask the designer to show you a similar example wp site they've recently developed. You, or have an SEO, look it over for the requirements and HTML markup.
2. you, or have an SEO, look over the site they build for you before it launches to check the code.

But really, there's nothing inherent about WP that you have to look out for, much of the issues come up when people make bad themes or bad custom designs.

Definitely use Yoast SEO!

-Dan

[BlueprintMarketing]

PS

I see  that you are in the United Kingdom one nice thing is if you use getflywheel.com they have a data center in London as does WPengine.com , Pagely.com Has a caching server there With Getflywheel.com also you have your own VPS and IP for every single site.

[BlueprintMarketing]

• No icebergs you have complete control of the code. If you know HTML you have 2 choices you can either edit from inside the WordPress site itself on the backend. Or you can do it over FTP whatever your favorite option is. As far as things that it cannot do that are search engine related there's nothing I can think of that is a negative about WordPress aside from the fact that it has a database and in my opinion needs a managed WordPress hosting company After being placed on a  managed WordPress host they are able to be faster than 100% HTML website.

Some advice use a managed WordPress host the security, speed and access to incredible free knowledge regarding WordPress is well worth it.

Read this fantastic post by a true WordPress expert  Dan Shure of evolving SEO

http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

WordPress is ideal for search engines and if you want to see how quick they are use,

Check out any of the links I've given you below their all hosted on an assortment of different hosts however they will run very quickly.

This is worth the extra attention simply put these managed WordPress hosting companies will answer these questions as they are WordPress experts as well as a host.

My advice is to go forward with WordPress is an excellent platform Matt Cutts uses WordPress for his blog.

For creating the

Post titles and meta descriptions

Canonical link

Breadcrumbs

& more use http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ it is free and the best. If you combine that with powerful hosting along with a good developer & preferably Genesis 2.0 HTML framework you will have one hell the site.  The site the plug-in is found on above his made from Genesis 2.0

Check out the feature list:

1. Post titles and meta descriptions
2. Robots Meta configuration
3. Canonical
4. Breadcrumbs
5. Permalink clean up
6. XML Sitemaps
7. RSS enhancements
8. Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
9. Clean up head section
10. API Docs

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

I would use the Genesis 2.0 framework it is 100% HTML 5 and will give you the ability to make whatever you want your site to be. I think it is the best framework on the market and well worth it. You can find it along with themes at studiopress.com

Also when you're in the studio press website you can learn quite a bit. If you are commissioning a designer and then a developer to make the design into a site. I would stick to Genesis 2.0 HTML 5 framework. Wootheams is also HTML 5 however if you're making a custom project I would strongly recommend making a Genesis-based website. In fact I have given you information on other WordPress sites below and all of them are built on Genesis 2.0

If you are looking for a developer I can recommend Gregreindel.com  you can go to his site and see quite a bit about all aspects of WordPress code itself that he actually was instrumental in building the Genesis 2.0 framework making it available far before anyone else had it and even Yoast.com was built using his own code that was ahead of everyone else.

I strongly recommend him as a developer. He has just started his own agency literally the other day and has not completed the site yet however it is called AuthorityDev http://www.authoritydev.com/

Some other themes and framework companies to look at http://www.woothemes.com/ is a solid company as well. Look at Moz.com/perks for big savings on Woothemes the fact that Moz is such a Word press Pro site especially when it comes to perks 2 of the 3 hosting companies are managed WordPress hosts.

(If you use a Moz.com/perks host for WordPress I would not use any other host than Pagely.com 30% off for life or WPengine.com 4 months free hosting WordPress even though site ground says it is a WordPress hosting company & is a great host it just does not have the same WordPress only centric advice and performance as the other two.)

It has many excellent attributes for search engine optimization.

One thing I would recommend if this is your 1st WordPress site is using a managed WordPress hosting company.

WordPress has a database so it is slightly slower than HTML sites however by using not only will you a managed WordPress host not only will you gather back the speed you lost you will have a company with a tremendous amount of WordPress knowledge when you need it.

I would recommend Pressable (ZippyKid rebranded recently), WP Engine, Get Flywheel, Pagely and web synthesis as everyone of them will help you out with a lot more than just hosting your website.

Cost wise getflywheel.com only is $15 also look at moz.com/perks for discounts from the WP engine as well as Pagely. ZippyKid renamed as Pressable gives you a lot for the money web synthesis gives you  free Genesis framework allowing you to buy themes for roughly $30. However you can purchase a theme for $100 that comes with the framework and if you want to buy additional themes you do not have to repurchase  framework ever so it is your best fit. I can tell you get flywheel is very eager to help and the least expensive.

If you're worried at all about search engine optimization and WordPress being a bad thing for it I cannot think of anything other than what I've stated that is negative about WordPress. Remember it might be slower on a regular host and it should not in my opinion be hosted on a regular shared hosting platform, however it definitely can be if needed.

You will want to install the Yoast WordPress SEO plug-in it is one of the best on the market if not the best. There are 2 versions the premium and free version. The only differences the premium comes with an automatic 301 redirect ability and support. Other than that the free one is probably your best bet because the premium is $80.

If you would like to learn more about WordPress I would suggest checking out Yoast.com , GregRenidel.com, Webdevstudios.com

If I can help you in any other way with this please let me know. I prefer WordPress over any other platform currently and have tons of sites on many different hosts. So if you want to see what you can do with with WordPress check out a client's site Garrisonbespoke.com this was placed in studiopress.com as one of their top picks for Genesis-based websites. In addition the site stood up to 100,000 visitors last month when we made Time magazine and GQ. It is hosted on http://getflywheel.com/ , however I know that every host I just mentioned host capable of far more than that.

Sincerely,

Thomas